The Forsaken Hero — Chapter 3

Rigal Den

『リガルの魔窟』

Part 1

Although there were many dungeons located throughout the world, it seemed like this was the first dungeon anyone would start out with.

There were two reasons for this. First, the levels of the demons that appear are low. Second, Rigals, demons unique to this dungeon, give a disproportionately large amount of experience.

Our leading group was already fighting.

“Wind spirits, blow everything away! Wind!”

Wind blew due to the female student’s magic, stopping three Rigals in their tracks.

Rigals are demons that closely resemble oversized scorpions, around five times the size of a normal one. They are protected by a hard carapace, so physical attacks don’t work too well on them. They are, however, weak to fire-type magic.

Even the weakest offensive fire-type magic, Fireball, is able to take them out.

Not like I could even use that, though.

“Fire spirits, burn everything! Fireball!”

Samejima launched three fireballs toward the Rigals.

The monsters let out their death wails and transformed into particles of light as they died.

“I did it! I’m already level seventeen!”

The girl who prevented the Rigals’ attack with Wind did a victory pose.

Amazing. That’s probably the result of having stood in the front lines the entire time.

By the way, I was able to kill two demons that looked like enlarged ants earlier, so I’m level two.

They were tough enemies for me to beat since I can’t use magic. It took me several attacks to take them out, so Heige ordered me to stay in the rear because I was getting in the way.

I was low on stamina.

It would have been nice for them to at least have healed me.

“Really? Grats, Sajima. And nice assist on that a bit ago.”

Samejima praised Sajima. His personality was what it was, but even the girls fell for him.

“Eheheh, I guess it was! Thanks!”

The girl, Sajima, blushed from getting praised.

“This isn’t the kind of place you should screw around in, you two. Don’t let your guard down, any carelessness can get you killed.”

Annoyed by—or perhaps fed up with—their mushy mood, Heige gave them a warning.

“I know, I know. So there’s the stairs that lead down… how about we go down them?”

Giving his usual toothy grin, he pointed over to the stairs.

Heige’s face soured as soon as he heard the proposal.

“No can do. Nothing’s been mapped from there on, it’s all unknown.”

As a consequence of being for beginners, Rigal Den had been mapped considerably less than other dungeons.

After getting to the fiftieth floor, you’d have grown to a level high enough that there’d be no issues with simply heading to the next dungeon.

The country felt the same way in that there was no reason to needlessly endanger people to map it, so the mapping had only been completed down to the fiftieth floor.

And we were already at the fiftieth floor.

“It’ll be fine, just look at how many people we have with us. Besides, we should be safe enough with how strong we are now.”

“There are always exceptions. What do you plan on doing if there’s a demon that not even all of you together could defeat?”

“There won’t be. I mean, really, isn’t this just a beginner dungeon? There haven’t been any stronger monsters appearing in any of the floors ’till now, now has there?”

“There hasn’t, but…”

“It also gets harder to level up… right? Doing this will go a long way to reducing how long it takes for us to reach the day we defeat the Demon King. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?”

Samejima kept on pressing his point.

Everything he said was the truth. It was logical.

It could even be said that the chances of someone dying upon reaching the fifty-fifth floor was virtually zero.

However, Heige seemed to have sensed some sort of danger laying ahead.

When Samejima pressed him for a reason to not go, he was unable to say. It was most likely the intuition one cultivated through years of experience.

Which is why he was stumped on how to respond.

The time he spent being stumped turned out to be his loss.

“He said it’s fine! Let’s go, Shinji!”

Growing impatient, Kijima started running to the stairs as though to get a head start on everyone else.

“Takeshi, wait up!”

“Ah, Samejima!”

“H-hey, guys! Dammit!”

As if that were the green light, all of my classmates who were on the fiftieth floor followed each other down the stairs.

“… Eh?”

Which left me alone, confused on what to do.

I had no reason to actually follow them down. It’s not like heading back early would change how they treat me, so there was no need for me to worry about that.